Live data from Hacker News

Is Tor still safe to use?

blog.torproject.org

21–30 of 602 posts

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#21

The best attack against Tor is convincing people not to use it. If anyone tries to convince you Tor is not safe, ask yourself: cui bono?

The best attack against Tor is creating entrance and exit nodes that monitor traffic. That was the biggest risk factor when Tor was invented and it still is today.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same was true of Truecrypt. After the core team disbanded there was a full security audit which uncovered some very minor issues. People never really trusted Veracrypt though. Quite interesting how that turned out.

IIRC there were a lot more options by the time of the Truecrypt-Veracrypt shift. Truecrypt was around when drive encryption was otherwise an expensive enterprise software thing, but I think Bitlocker was included with Pro versions of Windows by the time of Veracrypt so that probably became the easiest free option - and probably with better compatibility as well.

this presumes that anyone would trust bitlocker.

https://pulsesecurity.co.nz/articles/TPM-sniffing

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#24
Federal agencies operate enough exit nodes to make Tor use risky at best. I have no idea if they have since implemented some feature to prevent this but if not I would stay far away from Tor if you're planning to do illegal things. There's also the risk of trusting service operators to secure any PII you expose on marketplaces.

Not that I think the Fed's would blow their cover to hunt down people buying drugs but still seems stupid to trust.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#25

The best attack against Tor is convincing people not to use it. If anyone tries to convince you Tor is not safe, ask yourself: cui bono?

After the Snowden revelations regarding FOXACID and QUANTUM going largely undressed in the tor project, people have every right to feel sketched out with using ToR for anything. "We're still helping people" just isn't a good enough argument for most people.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/how_the_nsa_a... https://blog.torproject.org/yes-we-know-about-guardian-artic...

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#26

Federal agencies operate enough exit nodes to make Tor use risky at best. I have no idea if they have since implemented some feature to prevent this but if not I would stay far away from Tor if you're planning to do illegal things. There's also the risk of trusting service operators to secure any PII you expose on marketplaces. Not that I think the Fed's would blow their cover to hunt down people buying drugs but sti…

If they run just the exit node they still can’t de-anonymize you right?

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#27

Federal agencies operate enough exit nodes to make Tor use risky at best. I have no idea if they have since implemented some feature to prevent this but if not I would stay far away from Tor if you're planning to do illegal things. There's also the risk of trusting service operators to secure any PII you expose on marketplaces. Not that I think the Fed's would blow their cover to hunt down people buying drugs but sti…

Monitoring exit nodes does not necessarily reveal hidden services, though.

Edit: Never does, exit nodes are not part of the circuit, thanks to commenter below.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC there were a lot more options by the time of the Truecrypt-Veracrypt shift. Truecrypt was around when drive encryption was otherwise an expensive enterprise software thing, but I think Bitlocker was included with Pro versions of Windows by the time of Veracrypt so that probably became the easiest free option - and probably with better compatibility as well.

this presumes that anyone would trust bitlocker. https://pulsesecurity.co.nz/articles/TPM-sniffing

Being able to sniff a key as it transits a local bus is a very different kind of compromise of "trust" than believing that something is preemptively backdoored by a threat actor. It is deeply mysterious that Microsoft don't simply use TPM encrypted sessions to prevent this, though.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#29
Depends on your risk, if are are trying to avoid censorship and political repression in say Iran or china you are probably fine

If you are an enemy of the United States you probably aren’t but that’s a high bar

Post reply on HN